Brown Bag Lunch: "Neural Activity Associated With Sport and Non-Sport Sounds in Athletes"

Brandon Moeller
CLASS.UH.EDU

March 2, 2010

Graduate student Beth Owens will lead a presentation about how athletes process sounds while engaged in their sport during this month's Developmental Psychology Brown Bag Lunch Series.

Owens offered a brief synopsis of the presentation:

"The age at which an individual begins to learn a new skill or concept has been shown to have an effect on acquisition of bird song, musical abilities, and first and second language. All of these domains have something in common: they require processing of auditory stimuli. However studies of auditory processing in another field, athletics, are lacking. Some evidence is now emerging that expertise in a sport can modulate both behavioral and neural responses and that expert athletes process information related to their own sport differently than other sports. The present study examines how athlete's brains are shaped by their athletic experiences in an fMRI study using familiar and unfamiliar sport and non-sport environmental sounds. This study has important implications for theories of athletic training, auditory processing, learning, and brain plasticity."

The event is scheduled for March 5 at 11 a.m. in room 135 in the Heyne Building.

The Developmental graduate program in the Department of Psychology is planning other brown bag lunch events for April and May during the Spring semester. For a schedule of the events, see the Developmental Psychology news page.

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